I’m an imposter and a fake and I fucking love it! I’m not ashamed of being an imposter, not at all, it means I’m jumping far outside of my comfort zone to become something that I’m currently not. It’s passion, challenge and excitement that leads me down the road of imposter syndrome. I’ve always kind of lived by the motto of “Fake it til you make it”, that one motto has gotten me further in my life than anything else. None of us knew the things we know now when we didn’t know them, at some point in time we had to pretend to be someone who we weren’t and by that we developed into who we are now for better or worse, hopefully better.
Currently I’m in the throes of an intense imposter syndrome. When I call myself a web developer I almost feel like I want to throw up a little because I know I’m just barely capable of doing some development on my own but with a massive and cushiony safety net below me. I am currently an imposter but that gives me the fuel to keep pushing forward until one day I will realize that I am no longer an imposter. I will realize that I am fully capable of the things that I am pretending to be capable of doing.
My embrace of being an imposter and faking it til I make it has typically given me a leg up when learning something new because I don’t want to be called out I push myself harder and harder until I’m at the point where I can play with the rest of them without feeling out of place. When I talk about faking it I don’t mean going about bragging about things that I don’t know but because as much as I will fake it I also don’t want to be disingenuous, I try to live my life with the most integrity possible. For me, faking it and embracing my imposter status is an internally directed mind trick that helps me grow faster and learn faster. I set a goal inside my mind and I will make sure that I am doing everything I can until I hit that goal and that is typically a result of pretending to be something that I am not but to myself.
When I’m in a group of people that are smarter and more experienced than me in the subject that I am faking it in I will not be boisterous and pretend to know things that I don’t know. Mostly I am quiet, listen, and absorb as much knowledge as I can, I’ll make mental notes so that later I can look up topics that I had no idea what they were talking about. It’s this way that I leverage more experienced people’s skills to build up my own knowledge. Once I do that for a while I will chime in on the topics that I feel comfortable in my knowledge of or I will ask questions about things I don’t fully understand. It’s the best way to move from imposter and pretender to being what you want to be.
I feel like people often get hung up on feeling like an imposter or trying to fake their way through things when they are so clearly out of their depth, they see being an imposter as a negative. The truth is though when you look at it with the right light you can make your imposter status work for you, you can use that internalized doubt as fuel for your ambition. We all face imposter syndrome at some point in our lives, many times we experience it multiple times, but we can use that discomfort to our advantage and embrace it, all we have to do is fake it til we make it.